ABSTRACT
Manet was not in the habit of hesitating before trying to put his large-scale works on public exhibition; he most often sent them to the Salon the same year they were painted. But for reasons we can only guess at, he kept the picture entitled Olympia in his studio for almost two years, perhaps repainted it, and submitted it to the Jury in 1865. In the case of Olympia the vocabulary is not especially forced, since an important part of what spectators reacted to in 1865 was textual in the ordinary sense of the word. A complete study of Olympia and its spectators would be cumbersome. Olympia is a picture of a prostitute: various signs declare that unequivocally. It is a matter of tracking down, in the writings on Olympia, the appearance of the normal forms of discourse and the points/topics/tropes at which they are simply absent, or present in a grossly disturbed state.
